Slashdot: How Windows Phone 8 Can Succeed

[pjs37]

I think that is also an important point, but even an army of salespeople pushing a certain device can't guarantee good sales.

AT&T would love to sell less iPhones (very expensive to subsidize). That is why they tried to push the Lumia 900 really hard during Q2. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out very well at all, even after spending 150 million on advertising campaigns, offering free Lumia 900's to sales staff and holding hundreds of Lumia 900 training events.

Some other piece of the puzzle is also missing.

Actually I think its marketing on a whole. AT&T 's goal was to push it during a brief window of time when people had to be buying smartphones. Personally I think the timing was terrible as I doubt its a popular time of year to upgrade for people.

The first issue is many people don't even know Windows Phones even exist. People I talk to always seem shocked when I mention its existence. That is not good and is MS's fault for not marketing it right to the general consumer which always seems to be a problem for them. They need product placement on TV shows they need to have ads all over TV it needs to be like a media blitz. They keep saying how they are spending all this money on marketing but I never actually see any of this marketing. The last time I saw an ad from MS was way back a long time ago talking about how MS helps kids learn as a company feel good ad. I guess their XBox ads too but that's usually more of their games and not the system itself.

Speaking of which I feel like that whole thing is a major missed opportunity. I know people who own iPhones, iPads, macbooks and wholly invested in buying new apple products yet they have an XBox 360 to play games with. The gaming market is a huge huge lucrative market. I feel like if they called the new tablet the "Xbox Tablet" it would sell in droves it would be all over the gaming media the tech media everywhere. Windows as a name really just doesn't sell anymore. Its kind of like "Well it came on our PC we bought and I use it at work meh" feeling to it. I know its Windows OS and I know is all about Windows Everywhere but XBox resonates a heck of a lot better with consumers IMO.

 

[cp2_4eva]

I feel MSFT is messing up on their timing and information as well. They don't understand that word of mouth can go a long way. Problem is, there isn't much word of mouth to go around because we don't truly know about the OS we are waiting for. We only know the hardware and OEM specific features of the Nokia devices. We may know more tomorrow when HTC has their event, but we still don't know if we can:

Save videos from our e-mail to our phones
Have separate volumes for music and ringtones
Have a sufficient notification center (debatable)

And those are just a few things. And the timing....man they should have dropped this like...last week. They know apple drops their phones shortly after he big Apple event every year. With this knowledge they could have stuck it to 'em by getting people excited a bit earlier. But I guess you can't rush perfection right Ballmer?